Category: Education

Science Fiction authors generally have a knack of forecasting future realities. In his epic work Dune, Frank Herbert saw a future where humans became so dependant on artificial intelligence that they ended up being enslaved by their own technology. Movies like AI and Bicentennial Man predicted robots acquiring the same rights as humans and living among us as equals.

And while in Dune the humans escaped their slavery and banned “thinking machines”, in The Matrix movie trilogy, humans were relegated to useful sources of energy for the machines, their bodies harvested to use as batteries.

The fiction is becoming reality at an incredible pace, as this latest news item demonstrates:

In ten years, robots will teach pupils

Daily Dispatch

12 Sep 2017

By HENRY BODKIN

ROBOTS will begin replacing teachers in the classroom within the next 10 years, as part of a revolution in one-to-one learning, a leading educationist has predicted.

Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the UK University of Buckingham, said intelligent machines that adapt to suit the learning styles of individual children would soon render traditional academic teaching all but redundant.

Seldon said programmes being developed in Silicon Valley would learn to read the brains and facial expressions of pupils, adapting the method of communication that worked best for them.

The new era of automated teaching promises an end to grouping children by year, as the personalised nature of the robots would enable pupils to learn new material at their own pace, rather than as part of a class.

“Everyone can have the very best teacher and it’s completely personalised; the software you’re working with will be with you throughout your education journey,” he said.

However, he said that the technology would have to be carefully introduced to avoid “infantilising” pupils and teachers.

As part of robot-led learning, teachers would adopt the role of “overseers”, monitoring the progress of individual pupils.

The efficiency of automated teaching would also mean that only 30% percent of school time will be spent in class, Seldon predicted.

He heralds this new era in a book, The Fourth Revolution, due out next year.

“The impact is going to be massive. This is beyond anything that we’ve seen in the industrial revolution or since with any other new technology.” — The Daily Telegraph

Welcome to another ‘indigecast’ of On the Brink Radio recorded once again in the dry bed of the Todd River in Alice Springs, Northern Territory of Australia. This show has been inspired not only by my presence in the heart of the dream-time but also being here for the last new moon and total solar eclipse visible across North America. It is a very important show in many ways and is really more of an outline of salient and inter-related topics being that the subject is so huge. I start out by examining ‘what is art?’ and then contrast ‘indigenous’ versus ‘civilized’ art as we have come to understand them.

SIBERIAN ROCK ARTNAVAJO SAND PAINTINGCLIFFORD POSSUM

I progress into Jose Arguelle’s concept of ‘art as internal technology’, look at ‘aboriginal’ art here in Australia…a meaningless concept that really denotes a marketing category, as several hundred discrete and unique styles and modes of art and painting existed and continue to exist here…and then describe my own story and journey, from my calling to become an astronomer when I was 12, to getting involved with Dr. John Lilly’s dolphin communication group when I was 24, receiving a ‘call’ to come down under when I was 34, and actually coming down under when I was 44.

SERENA HAYESJEFF PHILLIPS

A pretty amazing story, all told…and it keeps getting more amazing all the time.

The Ultimate Technology

In the second half of this show I introduce what I call the ‘Keringke-Lawlor-Lilly-Narby-Velikovsky’ Hypothesis, which not only describes several inter-related dimensions central to what my own personal life has been about thus far, but also to an understanding of what it means to be a human being in the world of today. This complex of connections relates the spiritual cosmologies of the indigenous people of Australia and their art as forms of ‘internal technology’; an understanding of water-based life on Mother Earth and planets in other star-systems, and the influence of the ‘solid state entity’, a electronic ‘life-form’ based on silicon; the cetaceans as ‘repeater stations’ for the signals of water-based life, as well as targets for elimination by the SSE; shamanic access of the consciousness of DNA; psychic and biological mutation of humanity as well as traumatization from repeated planetary level catastrophes spanning our entire existence.

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The Associated Press released video footage from inside a Brooklyn public library as it hosts Drag Queen Story Hour for kids, something that has been scheduled every month since last fall.

The children sit around as a man who calls his alter-ego Lil’ Miss Hot Mess reads them stories and leads them in sing-alongs about drag queens. In the AP video, he reads a story about a female character whose friends think she should be less of a tomboy and dress and act like a girl. In another story, you hear the man read to the kids, “We can both be grooms.”

Lil’ Miss Hot Mess asks the kids, “Who wants to be a drag queen when they grow up?”

“Drag Queen Story Hour is fantastic because it addresses all of these issues of gender fluidity and self acceptance and all of these topics that, um, are real — are very, very real,” said Kat Savage of the Brooklyn Public Library.

And the packed room of parents apparently loved it.

“It was great!” one enthusiastic mother said. “So much energy.”

Another mother said, “You know, that’s what I’m looking for in all of our outings, is to present different ways of being in the world and make that fun and available to my kid.”

The library has received some backlash for hosting this reading hour, but Lil’ Miss Hot Mess, who doesn’t give his real name for fear of harassment, doesn’t mind: “Those are people who think gay people are sinful, or evil, or, you know, bad to begin with. So, we’re just starting from such different places that it’s kind of irrelevant to me.”

Plans are to expand the program to other libraries in New York City.

Vice did a short film on these monthly drag queen story hours when they began last year and discovered they also happen in San Francisco. A mother interviewed for the film said she’s already taken her daughter to two of them and is glad to expose her preschool daughter to the concept:

“From the very beginning, kids are pushed into these gender roles, which is absolutely absurd because they’re just kids. I want her to have the opportunity to just be whoever she’s going to be, and know that her parents are going to love her and be happy whether she’s a she or a he or anywhere in between.”

Some 130,000 years ago, scientists say, a mysterious group of ancient people visited the coastline of what is now Southern California.

More than 100,000 years before they were supposed to have arrived in the Americas, these unknown people used five heavy stones to break the bones of a mastodon. They cracked open femurs to suck out the marrow and, using the rocks as hammers, scored deep notches in the bone. When finished, they abandoned the materials in the soft, fine soil; one tusk planted upright in the ground like a single flag in the archaeological record. Then the people vanished.

This is the bold claim put forward by paleontologist Thomas Deméré and his colleagues in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The researchers say that the scratched-up mastodon fossils and large, chipped stones uncovered during excavation for a San Diego highway more than 20 years ago are evidence of an unknown hominin species, perhaps Homo erectus, Neanderthals, maybe even Homo sapiens.

If Deméré’s analysis is accurate, it would set back the arrival date for hominins in the Americas and suggest that modern humans might not have been the first species to arrive. But the paper has raised skepticism among many researchers who study American prehistory. Several said this is a classic case of an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence — which they argue the Nature paper doesn’t provide.

“You can’t push human activity in the New World back 100,000 years based on evidence as inherently ambiguous as broken bones and nondescript stones,” said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University. “They need to do a better job showing nature could not be responsible for those bones and stones.”

For decades, discussion of early settlement of the Americas has focused on the tail end of the Ice Age. Most archaeologists agree that humans crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska sometime after 25,000 years ago, then either walked between ice sheets or took boats down the Pacific coastline to reach the wide open plains of Pleistocene America roughly 15,000 years before present. Though scientists debated the exact timing of this journey, their estimates differed by hundreds or a few thousand years, not tens of thousands.

“It is a bold claim,” Deméré acknowledged, “an order of magnitude older age than has been suggested.” But he asked his colleagues not to dismiss the research out of hand based only on a number.

“This evidence begs for some explanation,” he said, “and this is the explanation we’ve come up with.”

The rocks and mastodon remains were identified in 1992 by paleontologist Richard Cerutti, a colleague of Deméré’s at the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Cerutti was asked to monitor work on a new freeway south of San Diego in case any important fossils were uncovered.

When Cerutti spotted a broken tusk stuck in the soil overturned by an excavator, he called for a halt in activity and summoned Deméré to the site.

“You’ll want to see this,” Deméré recalled Cerutti saying.

The scientists set up a geographic grid system and began carefully excavating several more stones and bones, plotting each new object on their grid to preserve its location. It took several months to uncover every artifact.

“As the site unfolded over that five month period it became more and more exciting and more puzzling at the same time,” Deméré recalled.

The biggest find was a partial skeleton from a single American mastodon. Peculiarly, the largest bones were scarred and broken, but more fragile ribs and vertebrae were still intact. Some of the bones seemed to have been arranged deliberately alongside one another. Many bore the spiral fractures that are a signature of ancient people hammering on fresh bone — either to extract marrow for food or break the bone into tools.

The bones were clustered in groups around a few large, heavy stones known as “cobbles.” The size and makeup of these rocks didn’t match the fine-grained surrounding soil. They bore marks you’d expect to see on a hammer and anvil. Scattered around the site were flakes that seem to have been chipped off the cobbles, as though someone had struck the rocks against another solid object. When held up to their source stones, the flakes fit back into them like pieces of a puzzle.

“It was unusual to say the least … and suggested this was a not a typical paleontological site and we should consider the possibility that we had association of extinct megafauna with humans, or at least early human activity,” Deméré said of the findings.

But it was difficult to figure out how old the site was. Any soft tissue in the fossilized bones had long decayed, so scientists couldn’t use radiocarbon dating to determine their age. They attempted to date fossils using the uranium-thorium method, which measures radioactive decay of uranium. But the technique was not very reliable at the time, so the Cerutti mastodon remained an enigma.

More than a decade later, a mutual friend put Deméré in touch with archaeologist Steve Holen. Holen believes that human history in the Americas dates back much farther than the end of the Ice Age, something he acknowledges is a “minority position” in his field. For several years, he has been examining museum collections and new fossil sites in search of ancient bones that look like they were touched by people.

The breaks on the mastodon fossils looked as though they were human-caused, he said. But to make sure, Holen tried to recreate them using a stone hammer the same size as the one found at the Cerutti site and the skeleton of an elephant that had been recently buried.

“The bone was extremely fresh and smelled very bad,” Holen said of that experiment. “I almost wished I wasn’t doing this.” It took all of Holen’s effort — and the help of a younger, stronger colleague — to break the bones. When they succeeded, they recognized the same breakage patterns as the ones found on the fossils. There’s no evidence that anyone hunted or butchered the mastodon for meat, but it definitely seemed to him like some human or human cousin had cracked the bones.

“Once you do the experiment then you really can understand this much better,” Holen said.

Next the team reached out to geochronologist James Paces, who retried the now much-improved uranium-thorium dating technique on the bones. He concluded that they are 130,000 years old, give or take 9,400. This date corresponds with the accepted age of the layer of rock in which the bones and cobbles were found.

But it far exceeds any established date for settlement of the Americas. The oldest biological remains from any humans on the continent is a coprolite (fossilized poop) from 14,300 years ago. Studies based on genetic analysis of modern Native Americans suggest that humans didn’t make it over the land bridge that once linked northeast Asia to Alaska until 25,000 years ago.

If the stones and bones really are evidence of people, then who were they? How did they get to this part of the world so long ago? And why haven’t we found other evidence of their presence? Did they die out not long after they arrived?

Because there are no hominin remains at the site, and rock hammer technology was used by many hominin species, the scientists caution that discussion of the identity of these people is purely speculative. In a supplement to their Nature paper, they say the Cerutti people may have been Neanderthals, Denisovans (a species known only from a few fragments found in a cave in northern Siberia), or members of the species Homo erectus. It seems unlikely that they were Homo sapiens — anatomically modern humans didn’t migrate out of Africa until after 100,000 years ago, according to most estimates.

As for how they got here, Deméré said they may have been able to cross the land bridge before the last ice age, when the planet warmed and sea levels rose. Other species migrated to the Americas in this period, Deméré said, and the hominins may have followed them over.

Otherwise, the first Americans could have used boats to cross the Bering Strait, and then scoot down the Pacific coast — archaeological finds on the Mediterranean island of Crete suggest that hominins were able to cross the sea via boat more than 100,000 years ago.

To some who study American prehistory, this interpretation of the Cerutti site beggars belief. Meltzer called the claim “grandiose.” Donald Grayson, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Washington, noted that history is rife with examples of scientists misinterpreting strange markings on stone as evidence of human activity. He pointed to the Calico Hills site in the Mojave Desert, which the archaeologist Louis Leakey believed contained 200,000-year-old stone tools. Subsequent studies have largely discredited Leakey’s claim — the apparent tools were most likely “geofacts,” natural stone formations that only look like they were crafted by humans.

“It is one thing to show that broken bones and modified rocks could have been produced by people, which Holen and his colleagues have done,” Grayson said. “It is quite another to show that people, and people alone, could have produced those modifications. This, Holen [has] most certainly not done, making this a very easy claim to dismiss.”

Mike Waters, the director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M, also criticized the claim. To convince him that people were in the Americas so much earlier before the first physical evidence of their remains, he would expect to see “unequivocal stone artifacts,” he said. He doesn’t think the cobbles found at the Cerutti mastodon site meet that standard.

Rick Potts, the director of the Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History, was more measured in his appraisal. Though he thought the team’s analysis of the bones and stones was thorough, he pointed out a few oddities about the site. For one, it’s unusual that people would use hammer stones to process bones but not any sharp-edged tools, even though that technology had been around for more than a million years. For another, as he pointed out, the mastodon’s molars were also crushed, and there’s no reason he can think of that humans would crack the huge teeth. If those teeth were broken by natural forces, then perhaps the rest of the bones were too.

Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at NMNH who specializes in studying tooth and tool marks on ancient bones, agreed.

“It’s funny because when I first started reading the paper I didn’t see the extra zero and I thought, ‘oh, 13,000 years, this sounds good,'” Pobiner said. “And then I saw the extra zero and I thought, ‘Holy cow!’”

Pobiner acknowledged that the Cerutti site contains less archaeological evidence than scientists would like before making a claim of this magnitude. But as someone who has spent her whole career looking at scratch marks and breakage patterns on bones, the evidence looks to her like it could be human modification.

Deméré said that he and his colleagues considered possible alternate explanations, but none seemed to fit. Trampling by another large animal would not produce those breakage patterns, they concluded. And environmental forces, like a powerful flood, would have broken the smaller, more fragile bones as well as the big one. Holen added that the rock layer in which the artifacts were found is largely intact — it does not seem to have been subject to disturbances like earthquakes or upheavals that would make the site more difficult to interpret.

Erella Hovers, an archaeologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who reviewed the paper and wrote an analysis of it for Nature, said she thought the researchers did a thorough job of ruling out natural causes of the particular breakage patterns. She added that the evidence looks much like archaeological sites she has studied in Africa and the Middle East; if the same site was found in that part of the world, she said, people would have fewer questions about it.

The Cerutti site researchers expect to face scrutiny from his colleagues about the paper. That is partly why they have made 3-D images of the mastodon fossils available online.

“I think the models are important in terms of supporting the paper because they allow anyone to look at this evidence in much the same way the co-authors did,” co-author Adam Rountrey, collection manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, said in a statement. “It’s fine to be skeptical, but look at the evidence and judge for yourself. That’s what we’re trying to encourage by making these models available.”

The scientists also hope that their paper will prompt their colleagues to take a closer look at this period in American history. Perhaps they will find more evidence of hominin presence, bolstering the Cerutti researchers’ claim. Or perhaps the mastodon site is a fluke — or a mistake — and they will find nothing at all.

“The thing to remember is it’s a beginning to a new line of inquiry. It doesn’t solve anything,” said Hovers. “It asks new questions.”

Ancient stone carvings confirm that a comet struck the Earth around 11,000BC, a devastating event which wiped out woolly mammoths and sparked the rise of civilisations.

Experts at the University of Edinburgh analysed mysterious symbols carved onto stone pillars at Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, to find out if they could be linked to constellations.

The markings suggest that a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth at the exact same time that a mini-ice age struck, changing the entire course of human history.

Scientists have speculated for decades that a comet could be behind the sudden fall in temperature during a period known as the Younger Dryas. But recently the theory appeared to have been debunked by new dating of meteor craters in North America where the comet is thought to have struck.

However, when engineers studied animal carvings made on a pillar – known as the vulture stone – at Gobekli Tepe they discovered that the creatures were actually astronomical symbols which represented constellations and the comet.

Using a computer programme to show where the constellations would have appeared above Turkey thousands of years ago, they were able to pinpoint the comet strike to 10,950BC, the exact time the Younger Dryas begins according to ice core data from Greenland.

The Younger Dryas is viewed as a crucial period for humanity, as it roughly coincides with the emergence of agriculture and the first Neolithic civilisations.

Before the strike, vast areas of wild wheat and barley had allowed nomadic hunters in the Middle East to establish permanent base camps. But the difficult climate conditions following the impact forced communities to come together and work out new ways of maintaining the crops, through watering and selective breeding. Thus farming began, allowing the rise of the first towns.

Edinburgh researchers said the carvings appear to have remained important to the people of Gobekli Tepe for millennia, suggesting that the event and cold climate that followed likely had a very serious impact.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src=”/content/dam/science/2017/04/21/Position-of-the-sun-and-stars-on-the-summer-solstice-of-10950-BC-credit-Martin-Sweatman-and-stellarium-small_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNEaEPVj0ukpq09fI7aH1yBMC7RW9ZfAWIPxLerSbKeU.png” alt=”Position of the sun and stars on the summer solstice of 10,950BC” width=”287″ height=”179″ class=”responsive-image–fallback”/&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Position of the sun and stars on the summer solstice of 10,950BCCredit: Martin Sweatman and Stellarium

Dr Martin Sweatman, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, who led the research, said: “I think this research, along with the recent finding of a widespread platinum anomaly across the North American continent virtually seal the case in favour of (a Younger Dryas comet impact).

“Our work serves to reinforce that physical evidence. What is happening here is the process of paradigm change.

“It appears Göbekli Tepe was, among other things, an observatory for monitoring the night sky.

“One of its pillars seems to have served as a memorial to this devastating event – probably the worst day in history since the end of the ice age.”

Gobekli Tepe, is thought to be the world’s oldest temple site, which dates from around 9,000BC, predating Stonehenge by around 6,000 years.

Researchers believe the images were intended as a record of the cataclysmic event, and that a further carving showing a headless man may indicate human disaster and extensive loss of life.

Symbolism on the pillars also indicates that the long-term changes in Earth’s rotational axis was recorded at this time using an early form of writing, and that Gobekli Tepe was an observatory for meteors and comets.

The finding also supports a theory that Earth is likely to experience periods when comet strikes are more likely, owing to the planet’s orbit intersecting orbiting rings of comet fragments in space.

But despite the ancient age of the pillars, Dr Sweatman does not believe it is the earliest example of astronomy in the archaeological record.

“Many paleolithic cave paintings and artefacts with similar animal symbols and other repeated symbols suggest astronomy could be very ancient indeed,” he said.

“If you consider that, according to astronomers, this giant comet probably arrived in the inner solar system some 20 to 30 thousand years ago, and it would have been a very visible and dominant feature of the night sky, it is hard to see how ancient people could have ignored this given the likely consequences.”

The research is published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry.

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&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src=”/content/dam/science/2017/04/21/Position-of-the-sun-and-stars-on-the-summer-solstice-of-10950-BC-credit-Martin-Sweatman-and-stellarium-small_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNEaEPVj0ukpq09fI7aH1yBMC7RW9ZfAWIPxLerSbKeU.png” alt=”Position of the sun and stars on the summer solstice of 10,950BC” width=”287″ height=”179″ class=”responsive-image–fallback”/&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Keyhoe was famously cut off during an interview on television in the early 50’s (referenced in this later interview). The UFO research organisation NICAP, which Keyhoe led, had CIA operatives hidden within the ranks, as the Freedom of Information Act has since revealed. The CIA took a keen interest in UFO groups both as a means of psychological manipulation of public perceptions, and as a handy cover for flights of clandestine air technology, such as the U2 spyplane and various experimental exotic aircraft. In other words, disinformation.

Keyhoe presents himself as a calm, well spoken man with a thoughtful, logical approach to what was at the time, a very new and perplexing phenomenon.

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As an interesting diversion from current events, readers might be interested in this fascinating interview with one of the most extraordinary minds of the Twentieth Century: Architect, socialist and maverick, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright was 88 when this interview took place in the 1950s and clearly still possessed a sharp mind. In fact the program was extended to double it’s usual 25 minute slot as there was so much material to cover.

Selling a culture of ignorance to the young

As my readers know, I’ve been documenting the downfall of education in America for a long time. My basic logic course, contained in my collection, The Matrix Revealed, is one antidote.

Aside from what happens and what doesn’t happen in the classroom, the promotion of a popular culture devoted to glorifying ignorance certainly erodes children’s ambition to learn.

Let’s return to a “more innocent time” to pick up a clue, and a turning point.

Wonderful World, composed by Sam Cooke, Herb Alpert, and Lou Adler, broke on to the scene in 1960. It had legs. Later covers of the tune climbed the charts in 1965 and 1978, and then Cooke’s original performance was resurrected as a hit in 1985 and 1986:

Don’t know much about history Don’t know much biology Don’t know much about a science book, Don’t know much about the french I took But I do know that I love you, And I know that if you love me, too, What a wonderful world this would be

Just another sentimental popular tune; who cares? No one; except the lyric awoke a vast underlying YES in many hearts.

I don’t know nothin’, but love will carry the day, and the world will be wonderful then.

The obvious message: there is a shortcut to happiness. Learning is beside the point. It’s irrelevant. Just listen, the singer has found the key. He’s basically ignorant, but it doesn’t matter. If he can convince Her to love him, he has the answer the world has been waiting for.

He’s the hero. He’s the example.

Knowledge is just a con. It gets in the way. It creates adults. That’s a horrible fate. Remaining a child wins the prize. Children don’t have to worry. All they need is love. Let’s somehow reduce EVERYTHING to THAT.

As for Sam Cooke himself, well, he began singing with a group when he was six, he later composed a number of hit tunes, he launched his own record label (SAR), he put together his own music publishing company and a talent-management outfit. I don’t know what he knew and didn’t know, but he knew something. He worked tirelessly for years. (At the age of 33, in 1964, he was shot and killed in a Los Angeles motel. The circumstances surrounding his death are in dispute.) Point is, the Cooke who was singing about being ignorant was far from ignorant—as is the case with many performers who convincingly launch childlike sentiments to audiences for mass consumption. But these audiences, enveloped in the “feelings,” rarely bother to consider the source and the intelligence of the source.

Popular culture is a back-and-forth affair. The artist relays a quick dream, and the public buys it, because the dream arouses some latent idea that proposes a shortcut to happiness. An out.

The artist and his handlers are always looking for the fabled hook; the phrase that will pull in the crowd and galvanize their reaction.

Eventually, after years of swimming in pop culture, the tuned-up audience is conditioned to the notion that life’s secret has to be one hook or another. Little else is important.

Certainly, work is not important. Striving is not important. Ambition is not important. One’s own creative impulse is not important. Learning is not important. Those are all dead ends. Instead, something much simpler and easier (and vaguer) has to be the key.

In the realm of politics, there is a carryover. The answer in that arena would be simple, too. Greatest good. Love everybody right now. Kinder, gentler. I feel your pain. It takes a village. No child left behind. Hope and change. Yes we can.

Don’t know much about a science book, Don’t know much about the french I took But I do know that I love you, And I know that if you love me, too, What a wonderful world this would be

If you just took the last three lines of that lyric and eliminated the rest, you’d have…nothing. No hook, no impact. But add the “don’t know” piece, and you’re striking gold. Because the audience of mostly young people wants the “don’t know.” That’s what they’re looking for. A boil-down into the effortless item that allows them to win what they yearn for, by pleading ignorance. Perfect.

Don’t know much about history Don’t know much biology Don’t know much about a science book, Don’t know much about the french I took But I do know that I love you, And I know that if you love me, too, What a wonderful world this would be Don’t know much about geography, Don’t know much trigonometry Don’t know much about algebra, Don’t know what a slide rule is for But I do know that one and one is two, And if this one could be with you, What a wonderful world this would be Now, I don’t claim to be an “A” student, But I’m tryin’ to be For maybe by being an “A” student, baby, I can win your love for me Don’t know much about history, Don’t know much biology Don’t know much about a science book, Don’t know much about the french I took But I do know that I love you, And I know that if you love me, too, What a wonderful world this would be History Biology Science book French I took But I do know that I love you, And I know that if you love me, too, What a wonderful world this would be

I can’t resist tossing off a salute to the Beatles, because if you think Sam Cooke was scraping the bottom of the barrel, his lyric was Shakespearean laid alongside the 1963 Lennon/McCartney offering, I Want to Hold Your Hand. This was not the Beatles of Eleanor Rigby or even Hello, Goodbye. It was the early rocket that set off the first US explosion of Beatlemania.

Get a load of this lyric:

Oh yeah I tell you somethin’ I think you’ll understand When I say that somethin’ I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand Oh please say to me You’ll let me be your man And please say to me You’ll let me hold your hand Now, let me hold your hand I want to hold your hand And when I touch you I feel happy inside It’s such a feelin’ that my love I can’t hide I can’t hide I can’t hide Yeah, you got that somethin’ I think you’ll understand When I say that somethin’ I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand And when I touch you I feel happy inside It’s such a feelin’ that my love I can’t hide I can’t hide I can’t hide Yeah, you got that somethin’ I think you’ll understand When I feel that somethin’ I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand

The single of the song sold five million copies in the US. It was folded into an album, Meet the Beatles!, which soon piled on another 3.5 million sales. The 1960s were off and running.

Nothing would ever be the same.

I’m told the real hook in I Want to Hold Your Hand is the opening phrase: “Oh yeah.” The kids loved it right away.

And if you want culture, you’ve got to go to the kids. They know what’s happening. They’re on the cutting edge…

Of the cliff.

It quickly became apparent to ad agencies, and corporations, and politicians, and media barons, and even the medical cartel, that targeting children was the new Thing. Don’t raise them. No. Bring the adults down to the child’s level.

That was the breakthrough.

The kiddies want what they want when they want it.

Convert society into a diaper-dream.

Hawk that dream from Norway to the southern tip of Argentina.

Buttress it with psychological clap-trap.

Call it, I don’t know, something like…

Utopia.

Yes, that’ll work.

As long as no one THINKS.

Oh yeah.

If you reduce the English language to the level of the two songs I’ve presented here, why would children in school want anything more?

They already believe they know the secret of life.

And if the “secret” doesn’t deliver the goods, it’s an easy step for the children to then consider themselves victims.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

The influence of music, and more specifically SOUND and VIBRATION, upon popular culture, has been an interest of mine for a long time, and I might add to JR’s thoughts that this mental programming continues today, with a focus on instant gratification and materialism.

Those of us still able to think outside the mental prison would benefit from looking up the subject of “Phase Conjugate Adaptive Resonance”. It’s not just the lyrics, it’s the actual sound that opens the mind to suggestion, allowing the vocals to be more easily absorbed by the brain. Think you’re just enjoying the funky beat and ignoring the words? Think again!